Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tiernan

Sarah Morelli didn’t have to beckon me the way my father did. I never visited the Morelli Mansion without stopping by her suite of rooms in the east wing. While I hadn’t called ahead, one of the servants had obviously clued her in to my presence, because when I opened the door to her rooms, she was dressed in a floor-length silk nightgown trimmed in fur and a matching dressing gown with her arms held open for me to step into.

I was a thirty-year-old man, but I did as she silently bade and stepped into her heavily perfumed embrace. Beneath the artificial flower notes, she smelled of expensive vodka and the bitter aftermath of pills she kept too long on her tongue before swallowing them down. She cupped the back of my head and swept her other hand between my shoulders, over the thirteen tally marks Bryant had forced me to get from the time I was seventeen to mark me as his weapon the way military men notched their guns with each kill.

She liked to brush her hand over them through my clothes as if she could erase the permanent ink there.

“My sweet monster,” she crooned to me before pulling away, keeping me close with both hands on my forearms so she could study me. “You look tired.”

“You look beautiful,” I countered, shaking off her hands so I could move farther into the feminine room.

Her little dog, Sheba, yapped at me from her silk cushion, but I ignored her as I took a seat on the white couch, unbuttoning my jacket.

“I can’t stay long,” I mentioned immediately. “I’m working on something.”

“Oh?” Sarah asked, moving to the bar cart to pour herself a drink even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning. “I thought that ugly bitch died?”

“She did. Her children didn’t.”

“Ah, well, that’s interesting.” She walked around the couch opposite me, but didn’t stop until she was beside me, sitting with our thighs pressed together. It was close, too close maybe for a normal mother/son bond. But Sarah wandered her rooms in this house like a caged bird, infrequently visited by her children other than myself and flatly ignored by Bryant unless he had some use of her. She craved affection, attention, and I was her single source for it.

I put up with it even though I disliked being touched especially when it was only to satiate her needs and not my own. I’d been a momma’s boy since the day she shoved that McTiernan ring on my broken finger just like I’d been my father’s weapon since the day he cut me open with his belt.

When I was fourteen, Lucian paid attention to me for the first time in seven months.

I’d been counting.

He found me in Sarah’s solarium, sitting at the edge of the large koi pond hidden among the greenery, an exact replica she’d had made of the one at Lion Court. I liked to sit there listening to the trickle of water while I struggled to read through my textbooks, the words merging together until my head ached.

I was so startled by his appearance, I almost fell into the fucking pond. He didn’t laugh at me the way Carter might have or offer to help me despite his fear like Eva. Instead, he threw something at me.

I caught it reflexively, the book slim in my hands. On the cover, a photo of a marble bust and the words “Oedipus Rex.”

“They wrote a book about you and Mom,” Lucian told me, his tone impossible to read, his expression flat.

He turned on his heel and left.

It was a cruel present when I struggled to read at the best of times with my dyslexia, but I was eager, happy almost that he’d given me a present. I was eager to read it and I spent the next month painstakingly moving through the pages.

Only to realize the extent of cruelty the book represented.

It was a tragic story about a man who unwittingly killed his own father and married his mother. When he realized what had transpired, he gouged out his own eyes.

The next time Lucian sought me out, he seemed surprised to see my eyes remained in my head.

Fucked up didn’t even begin to describe the Morelli family dynamic.

“So, what’re you doing with them?” my mother asked, her diamond-encrusted fingers trembling as she raised the martini to her mouth. “You wouldn’t mention them if you didn’t think they would be useful in taking that cunt Caroline down.”

I didn’t bat an eye at her language even though most people who thought of Sarah Morelli would conjure an image of the beautiful, polite, and much younger wife of Bryant instead of the cursing, pill-popping drunk he’d turned her into behind closed doors.

“There’s something there,” I agreed vaguely.

“You like them,” she ventured, much shrewder than anyone ever gave her credit for. “You don’t want to use them like this?”

“I will,” I said with a shrug.

“Of course. You’ve always done what you were told.” Her voice was as bitter as it was full of pride. She enjoyed my loyalty but hated Bryant’s use of me. “Nothing matters more than taking down the Constantines. You know that better than most.” She swept her hand down my arm, then tapped a finger to the tattoo on my left hand, a cherub crying blood. “They’ve taken so much from you. From this family.”

I didn’t respond, but then, I didn’t have to.

Sarah had been there through all of it, silently waiting in the wings to comfort me after all the bigger players on the board made their moves. It never occurred to her to stand up for her children. It stopped occurring to us a long time ago to ask.

In addition, she had her own vendettas and prejudices against the Constantines. Against Caroline, the woman who broke her husband before she ever got a chance at loving him.

“How old are they?”

“Seventeen and seven.”

I thought of Brando convulsing on the floor of the kitchen, of his smiles when I taught him to fight like Iron Man in the ring, of the sound of his voice endlessly babbling to Ezra or Walcott or Henrik, whoever would listen. He was as bright and green as lime juice squeezed straight from the fruit. It was impossible not to be drawn in by his candor and charm.

Then Bianca, so much older in age and soul, those big blue eyes filled with history I wanted to unearth like an archeologist. I wanted to pillage her for treasure, use her for my schemes and other, darker desires that seemed to surge further with shocking regularity.

My hand twitched where it lay on my thigh, remembering the sharp impact of the bamboo cane against the sweet, lush curve of her kilt-covered ass. The sweet schoolgirl bent over for me. It was a provocative image, but too generic. I hadn’t imagined when I ordered her to bend over for me that I would be like wet steel beneath my trousers as her pain blossomed into pleasure, her tears so pretty, her cries like music.

“You’re old enough to be their father.” Sarah’s voice interrupted my salacious memories. “The teenager, Bianca, isn’t it? She’s pretty?”

I shot her an unamused glance. “Not all of us fancy jailbait, Mother.”

She laughed at me, her tragic eyes flashing with mirth. In a way, they reminded me of Bianca’s. Unwittingly, I wondered if Bianca would end up like her one day, tragic enough to drown her sorrows in a bottle and her regrets in a pill-induced fog. A shiver of dread dripped down my spine like ice water.

“They shouldn’t make gardeners so cute,” she said coyly.

“And pool boys?”

Her eyes sparkled as she shrugged. “The odd instructor too. Those yogis are so limber.”

I shook my head at her, but it felt good to make her laugh. I didn’t usually evoke that response in people, and she didn’t usually give it.

“Are you attracted to her?” she asked, because she thought being my mother meant having the right to invade my privacy.

For the most part, I let her.

Her possessiveness was unhealthy, but it was all I had.

Still, I didn’t tell her about the way my body responded to Bianca. About how the sight of her tears when I wrenched off her locket made my dick hard. How my blood burned when she took up her verbal foil and sparred with me. How I’d almost tossed her into the pond and fucked her among the waterlilies after taking that bamboo switch to her ass. She wasn’t afraid of me, which was rare, but even more unique was the glimpse I caught sometimes in that bright blue gaze that suggested she might want me to hurt her. After last night, I was sure that she did.

The idea was dangerously arousing.

All that unblemished golden flesh under my punishing grip, those too-ripe-for-a-girl curves slapped and bitten until they were marked as mine if only for one night.

Oh yes, I was attracted to her. The scent of her alone made me want to trace the source to that fluttering pulse in her neck, always beating madly around me. It was half the reason I loved to aggravate her.

She was so pretty when she was angry.

And I learned last night, she was even prettier when she cried.

It was growing increasingly impossible not to imagine wedging myself into that snug virgin cunt just to see her cry as I forced her to take all of me.

I may have slept with her mother, but the sex was nothing but a transaction, my attraction to her hardly serviceable.

It should have disgusted me, maybe, to think of fucking her daughter.

A better man wouldn’t have dreamt of it.

But I was not a good man and I didn’t want to be.

“Are you going to tell me not to get involved?” I asked drily. “Now is a little late to start acting maternal.”

She pursed her lips at me for the barb, but otherwise only shrugged, stirring her olives in the glass with one manicured finger. “You’re already involved in her life. Fucking her might be the cherry on top of the humiliation cake. There’s nothing Caroline hates more than fraternization between our houses. Though, even I shudder to think what Ice Bitch might do to her if she got the chance.” She cocked her head at me. “Which begs the question, what happens afterward?”

“Afterward,” I echoed, not because I hadn’t thought about what happened after I succeeded with my plan, but because for the first time in my life, I was unsure of the answer.

“Do you feed her to the Constantine dogs and see how they might humiliate and ruin Lane’s bastard child? Do you let them fend for themselves?” She paused long enough for the silence to take on a shape, an eloquence all on its own. “You can’t keep them, obviously. Strays don’t make good pets, Tiernan.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured her, but my lungs felt twisted up in my chest thinking about turning them over to foster care, seeing them split up between different homes. I wondered if The Gentlemen of Lion Court would stay with me or go with the Belcantes if I did banish them, their loyalty transferred to the orphans. “But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“The Constantines deserve what’s coming to them,” she muttered darkly before draining her martini and getting up to pour another.

I hesitated before asking the question that had gone unanswered my entire life. “Do you hate them because Bryant loved Caroline first? Or does it have something to do with my real father?”

I knew the look of sour disapproval on my mother’s face the way I knew the sky was blue. I’d seen it every single time I had tried to broach the topic of my parentage since I was twelve and first cared enough to ask about it.

“Don’t be silly, Tiernan, Bryant is your father,” she said woodenly, reciting lines from a script.

“Don’t bullshit me, Sarah,” I warned. “You promised you’d tell me one day and I’m of the mind that day is today.”

Her hand shook slightly as she lifted her martini glass to her lips and drained it. “I don’t want to talk about this. It-it’s not good for my nerves. You don’t want to make your mother sick, do you?”

“No,” I agreed. “But in that same vein, you don’t want to make your son upset, do you? All of those maternal instincts must be crying out from keeping me from my real father for so long.”

She scoffed lightly. “He is no better than Bryant, so don’t go crafting some silly fairytale about it.”

“Nothing about my life is a fairytale, why would this be any different? I still want to know the truth.”

Her lips flatlined. “Not now, Tiernan. Perhaps…if you’re successful if ruining those Constantines, I’ll tell you the truth, however sordid it may be.”

“Swear to me,” I demanded, taking her by the shoulder so she was forced to face me, to read the look of brutal assertion in my eyes. “If I succeed, you’ll tell me what blood runs through my veins.”

There was a war in her eyes, fear clashing with resolve and anger, maybe even a little bit of guilt. Finally, she sighed and stared longingly at her empty glass before fixing her glazed eyes on mine. “Fine, Tiernan, if you succeed, I’ll tell you about your father. Though, ruining the Constantines should be reason enough for you. They deserve what’s coming to them.”

My entire life, I’d been raised to believe the same, but for the first time, I noticed a crack in the foundation. Technically Bianca and Brando were Constantines. Lane’s blood ran through their veins, but they had been raised Belcantes. I had no idea who my father was, but I’d been raised a Morelli. It was who I was, regardless of my parentage. Could the same be said for Bianca and Brandon?

The dangerous truth was that I wasn’t entirely certain anymore that they deserved what their father had bought them.